Day 4 - Market Basket Survey

Here are some picture of my day today.

The first is a picture of the kitchen where we eat all of our meals.

For breakfast I usually eat a cereal mixture of corn flakes, cheerios, and some really good homemade granola with a banana.

Lunch or comida is the biggest meal of the day and we eat it aroun 1:30 or 2 PM every day.

Around 11 AM we have botanas or snacks.

Then dinner is usually a mixture of leftovers from lunch and a couple of other things, always a salad.

There is always fresh fruit on the tables so you can have some whenever you want. There are guavas, which is what the second picture is. There are also bananas, apples, and oranges. I had never tried a guava before but they are excellent and I couldn't believe I had never tried one.

The last picture you see is of my dinner tonight.

I had a salad that had tomatoes, onions, avocados, carrots, and lettuce with a homemade salad dressing. I put some diced cantaloupe on top of it. Then I had some rice with my favorite dish I have had so far here. It is the green and tan colored mixture. It is green chiles stewed with chicken in some kind of sauce that I am guessing is sort of a roux with a little cheese. It reminded me a lot of green chile enchiladas from New Mexico.

At lunch I pretty much ate this same thing but I ate the green chile chicken stuff with a corn tortilla!!!!!!! I love corn tortillas.

They also always have pan dulce in containers on the counter where they come fresh every morning from a bakery right down the street called Panaderia San Antonio.

Today we did an activity that was called the Market Basket Survey.

We were divided into groups of four and given two items to buy in the central market called El Mercado Lopez Mateos. My group had to purchase 1 kilo of bananas and 1 kilo of eggs.

We also had to price a tooth brush and 3 pens.

The bananas cost us 8 pesos or aabout 67 cents and a kilo is about 8 bananas.

The eggs cost 15 pesos or about $1.25 and a kilo of eggs is about 18 or so eggs, maybe more.

The tooth brush cost 12 pesos or $1 and 3 pens were 9 pesos.

After we got back from the market we did some conversions to figure out how many hours a person making minimum wage in mexico would have to work to earn enough money to buy these items.

It was quite a surprise to me to find out that the minimum wage in Mexico is about 50 pesos per day since people are not paid by the hour like in the United States.

So for example, it would take someone from Mexico earning minum wage 2.4 hours to earn enough money to buy a kilo of eggs.

We did one more conversion which I thought was the most interesting.

We took the number of hours it would take someone from Mexico to earn enough money for the object and multiplied that number by $7.25, the minimum wage in the United States.

This number allows us to see the US cost equivalent or the price that US consumers would have to pay if they had to work the same number of hours as a Mexican worker.

So I am going to give the eggs as an example again.

It takes a Mexican worker 2.4 hours to buy the eggs. Multiply this by 7.25 and you get $17.40.

This is how much the US cost equivalent is.

When you see this cost of $17.40 for 18 eggs, that is very expensive, much more expensive than it seems previous to this activity.

We learned some other important things today like that between 40 and 60 percent of the population of Mexico earns a living working for themselves or as street vendors, taxi drivers, black market sellers, etc. Although Mexico does have a lot of social welfare and good healthcare, most of the population does not receive these benefits because they are the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder and are unable to have a job in which they would receive these benefits.

My white middle class guilt took me over for a bit but I am trying get over it because it is not worth feeling guilty because as one of my professors Anita said, "feeling guilty does not help anyone, or do anything."

I would rather engage in direct action than feel guilty.